KC Times, June 21, 1945 Kansas City Interstate Fairgrounds (1880s) The fairgrounds ran from Thirty-eighth and Penn Streets (nobody called it Pennsylvania Avenue then) west to Roanoke Road and north to Valentine Road. The racetrack was at Thirty-Eighth and Summit, running north. To make this track it had been necessary to grade and fill. That […]
KC Journal Post, May 23, 1937 (Elmhurst is now the location of the Uptown Shoppes. The original wall surrounding the estate still exists.) Stately Home of Late Mrs. Bird in Wrecker’s Hands A wrecking crew this week will start raising the stately home, Elmhurst, of the late Mrs. Annie Byrd. The house stands at the […]
Valentine Landmark, Norman School, Served Neighborhood Children The Norman School, a major landmark in our neighborhood, is located between Jefferson and Southwest Trafficway at 35th Street. The school opened as a small frame building in 1906 to serve first and second grade children who lived in the newly-built residential districts in the Valentine area. Later […]
historical property The Norman School—a Kansas City landmark, a Valentine treasure by Pam Hoelzel The Norman School, a small wood frame building at Jefferson between 35th and 36th Streets, opened its doors to first and second grade students in 1901. While students attended classes in the frame buildings, the west wing of the current stone […]
Valentine’s Longest-Lasting Business Reveals Neighborhood History Edward Browne has shared this fascinating history of the buildings at the corner of 33rd and Pennsylvania. By Edward Browne In the 1880s, my maternal grandparents, Edward and Mary Dillon Flavin, both from County Kerry, Ireland, purchased a home and established a grocery store in the 2700 block of Jefferson […]
Kansas City Star, May 22, 1900 Colonel Allen McGee is 85 Seventy-three years ago Allen B.H. McGee came to Kansas City. Yesterday was the eighty-fifth anniversary of his birthday, and last night the event was celebrated by Colonel McGee and his friends at the old McGee homestead, at Thirty-seventh and Broadway. Of course there was […]
The original “owner” of Valentine was Allen B.H.McGee, son of one of the founders of Kansas City. McGee bought 160 acres from Richard W. Cummins in 1833. Cummins obtained the land by patent,according to local historian Lyle Kennedy, who also provides many of the following details of what happened to the land over the next […]
